We can all say to all members of Congress: If you don’t end this shutdown, we will vote each and every one of you out of office next year.

At the risk of sounding like an advocate of domestic violence rather than an advocate of ending the government shutdown, allow me to draw on a couple of stories from my child-rearing years.

In the first tale of two children, it was a Saturday morning in 1989. I was a newspaper reporter and photographer in an outlying bureau, and a local police chief had asked me to stop by the community's Winn Dixie to snap a photo and write a little story about his department’s crime-fighting efforts.

As a mother of two young children, Saturdays weren’t my favorite days to work. On the other hand, this particular chief was a frequent source of inside information, so instead of sleeping late and doing housework, I shipped our 5-year-old son and his father off on errands, loaded my camera, notebook and chronically cranky 2-year-old daughter in the car, and headed to the supermarket 15 miles away.

If you know 2-year-olds, you know what happened next. As we walked into the store, where the chief and McGruff the Crime Dog were waiting for us, my daughter launched an epic temper tantrum.

I could have tried to reason with her. I should have remained calm and told myself that there was no need to be embarrassed. But instead, I snapped. Tossing my purse to the chief and my camera and notebook to a startled McGruff, I hauled my child outside, spanked her fanny and, nose-to-nose, told her in no uncertain terms that by God, she would stop crying and she would behave when we walked back inside.

And she did.

The second tale of two children occurred in 1985 or 1986, when our toddler son spent his days in the home of a sweet-natured and highly competent baby sitter who met me at the door one afternoon with these words: “I’ve already told Jennifer’s mother what I did, and now I’m telling you and the other parents so everybody will know what happened.”

Jennifer was a biter, and her parents hadn’t been able to break her of the habit. In recent weeks, she’d bitten several of her little colleagues at the sitter’s house. That morning, when she bit our son on his face, drawing blood, the sitter took matters into her own hands and bit Jennifer on the arm – not nearly as hard as the child had bitten James, of course, and certainly not breaking her skin, but just hard enough for her to understand that being bitten hurts.

I was OK with what the sitter had done, and so was Jennifer’s mother. As for the child herself, Jennifer never bit anybody again – not at the sitter’s house or, according to her grateful parents, anywhere else.

She’d learned her lesson, just as my 2-year-old learned her lesson a few years later. And they learned those lessons when somebody got in their faces, showed a measured and appropriate amount of force and said, You will not behave this way any longer.

That is what we, the American people, must now show and say to our bratty, irresponsible representatives in Congress, who should be but apparently aren’t ashamed of allowing the federal government to shut down.

I don’t care if you like or hate Obamacare or President Obama himself. Ditto for Speaker John Boehner or the Republican Party. The bottom line is, it's scandalous that Congress would play chicken with our nation's stability.

We can’t all go to Washington and spank 495 people on their bottoms or bite their arms, but we can all say to all of them, If you don’t end this shutdown, we will vote each and every one of you out of office next year. Regardless of whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, and regardless of whether you supported or opposed the shutdown, you’re all responsible for it. So put a stop to it now or you’re all gone in 2014.

Could such a threat work? Yes – but only if members of Congress were convinced that voters would follow through on their vow to replace them.

I say we give it a try. After all, as certain former biters and tantrum-throwers will tell you, sometimes there’s nothing like getting nose-to-nose with reality to show you the errors -- and the consequences -- of your ways.

Frances Coleman is a freelance writer living in Baldwin County. Email her at frances@francescoleman.com and "like" her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.

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